Bearing Witness

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Lately I have been doing a bit of research about the “erasure” of images (for a small film program), and while doing so I stumbled into Ken Gonzales-Day‘s work, in particular his Erased Lynching project. In this series of photographs, he appropriated images from historical lynching postcards and digitally “removed” the lynch victims, leaving the crowds of onlookers. Gonzales-Day made this work around the same time as the ‘Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’ exhibition was travelling through the States (2000 – 2002), which was the subject of intense critical debate. Commenting on this exhibition, Dora Apel wrote: “When we look at lynching photographs today, we try not to see them. Looking and seeing seem to implicate the viewers, however distanced and sympathetic, in the acts that turned human beings into horribly shamed objects, as if viewing itself was a form of aggression. Most of us would prefer not to look.” I found this quote in the essay ‘Not looking at Lynching Photograps’ by James Polchin (part of the reader ‘The Image and the Witness. Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture’, edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas). In this fascinating essay Polchin tries to come to terms with exhibiting and viewing these images. How do you display photographs of racist violence without replicating the spectacle of violence? This is a complex question, especially considering the fact that these photos actually furthered the precise project of lynching, as powerful visual symbols that helped to rationalise white supremacy in the U.S. Southwest. Furthermore, Polchin raises to problem of how we ought to look at these images. He quotes Hilton Als (who wrote a piece for the published monograph to the exhibition – a tome of images that oddy resembles a coffee-table art book): “What I see in those pictures… is a lot of crazy-looking white people, as crazy and empty looking as the white people who stare at me. Who wants to look at these pictures? Who are they all? When they look at those pictures, who do they identify with? The maimed, the tortured, the dead, or the white people?” These images, whether presented as art, as historical documents or memento, present an uncomfortable display where the complexities of photographic representation and historical witnessing challenge our assumptions about what an image can tell us. They, as Polchin writes, “shaped an experience of not looking, of filling that ambiguous and complicated space between event and representation, between witness and image”.

One wonders then about the impact of Gonzales-Day’s work. With this project he wanted to “raise awareness of sniffing history of racial violence in the United States”. While investigating the history of the lynching of Latinos in California, he discovered that the majority of Lynchings were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; and that more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity. Just as these events have been “erased” from history textbooks and the minds of most Americans, so too have the anonymous victims been erased from his photos – paying tribute to the victims while also placing the people who watched and/or committed these atrocities (and those who distributed these images, in stores and through the post office) front and center to face their crimes. This conceptual gesture is intended to “direct the viewers attention, not upon the lifeless body of lynch victim, but upon the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, and even consider the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past. The perpetrators, if present, remain fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime. As such, this series strives to make the invisible -visible. These absences or empty spaces become emblematic of the forgotten history made all the more palpable in light of the recent events surrounding the resurgence of the noose as means of intimidation and instilling fear everywhere from the workplace to the schoolyard”. Clearly, Gonzales-Day is deeply concerned with issues of spectacle, complicity, history and the construction/erasure of the other involved in dominant subjectivity formation. By editing out the abject object of victimhood, the act of bearing witness is emphasized (In an installation setting, some photos are blown up and stretched over two facing walls – one, a matte finish, the other, a reflective finish that mirrors the viewer so that s/he appears among the onlookers), allowing us to re-evaluate what we are looking at – or not looking at.

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update 15 december 2008: Pieter-Paul Mortier (who organises the ARTEFACT festival at art centre STUK in Leuven) pointed out that Ken Gonzales-Day’s project has quite a bit in common with some installations by Oliver Lutz, although the exploration of the interweaving of witnessing and complicity has been taken a step further here.

Lynching 1 (2007) is based on a photo that was taken on August 9th 1930, on the evening of the lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp in Marion, Indiana (original here). “In the photograph, lynchers and spectators are shown congragated below the two bodies that hung from a tree. Some people looked towards the bodies while smoking (or lighting) cigars, while others posed for the photographer. The rags clenched in the hands of a few, are commonly thought to be the torn remains of the pants of Abram Smith, also a common souvenir practice of that time.”

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Lutz repainted this photo, using infrared reflectography, a method developed in the late 1960s that enables art historians to examine hidden layers in paintings. Infrared radiation can make the outer skin of a painting appear transparent. In the installation a CCTV monitor displays a live surveillance video of this painting and the viewer while watching the monitor. The bodies of the deceased are only visible to the viewer once s/he looks in the monitor (and inadvertently becomes part of the spectator mob).

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Lynching 2 (2007) is based on a photo that was taken on the evening of the lynching of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Issac McGhie on June 15, 1920 in Duluth, Minnesota. “Six circus workers were detained on false accusations of having raped a white woman. A mob of 1,000-10,000 pulled the accused from their cells and held a mock-trial outside the police station. Three of the men were beaten and lynched on a light pole on block from the police station.”

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This installation consists of 10 ceiling mounted cctv cameras, which are situated facing a large painting based on this photo. CCTV video monitors situated on the floor show close-up portraits of people in the lynch mob otherwise not visible to the subject. The monitors face the painting so that the subject, when viewing the video monitors, inadvertently put himself in front of the cctv cameras and into the video frame.

Pirates of the Amazon

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Last Monday, the “Pirates of the Amazon” project was launched. Described by its developers as “an artistic parody” and “a ready-made and social sculpture of contemporary internet user culture” that “addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities”, it’s basically a Firefox add-on that inserts a “download 4 free” button on Amazon, which links to corresponding Piratebay BitTorrents. The add-on lowers the technical barrier to enable anyone to choose between “add to shopping cart” or “download 4 free”. ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ is not the only Amazon hack (remember Amazon Noir?) or pirate add-on for Firefox: IMDB, Last.fm, and Rotten Tomatoes all have their own pirate skin available. This particular one, developed by two students at the Media Design M.A. department of the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, did get quite a bit of attention. It made headline news on digg.com and was covered by Torrentfreak, CNET, the Washington Post and thousands of blogs out there.

However, in a message posted on Nettime yesterday, Florian Cramer (who teaches at Piet Zwart) & jaromil (the project tutor) wrote that the project received a take down request by the lawyers of Amazon.com. They write: “In our point of view, the legal grounds for that are contestable since the add-on itself did not download anything. It only provided a user interface link between the web sites Amazon.com and thepiratebay.org. Nevertheless, the creators complied to the request, taking both the add-on and original web site offline”.

They continue: “What is perhaps more disturbing however, are the openly hostile and aggressive Internet user comments in blogs and on digg.com. Unlike in a comparable situation only a couple of years ago, the majority of commentators failed to see the highly parodistic and artistic nature of “Pirates of the Amazon”.” (…) Apart from its humorous value and cleverness, the project is interesting on many levels and layers: For example, not just as a funny artistic hack of Amazon.com and The Pirate Bay, but also as a critique of mainstream media consumer culture creating the great “content” overlap between the two sites. We clearly see this project as a practical media experiment and artistic design investigation into the status of media creation, distribution and consumption on the Internet.

With the take down notice from Amazon.com, our students have been scared away from pursuing their art, research and learning in our institute. We do not want a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study because their work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues. We would like to gather statements in support of the “Pirates of theAmazon”. The students are turning their web sites into a documentation of their project and the reactions it triggered. If you would like tosupport them and contribute a short statement, please get in touch with us.”

The add-on itself, by the way, is still available online, here for example (In Firefox > file > open file > select the xpi file)

update: interesting reaction from tobias c. van Veen

“What does it mean to connect two things together? Much of critical scholarly work relies upon the process of citation: taking a piece of X in order to link it to Y, and thereby revealing the ways in which X and Y relate to each other. Without the ability to cite things, to sample them and to link them together, the process of scholarly work, if not writing and creative action itself, is obliterated before it begins. What does citation mean on the internet? It means not only ‘sampling’ as we commonly grasp it, but the ability to hyperlink. What is critical scholarly work on the internet? Such work no longer only takes the shape of a discourse or commentary, an essay posted somewhere or a blog; such work is increasingly taking the shape — and has for some time — of a website or other piece of software that demonstrates the principles it wishes to investigate. Such is the software project [ pirates-of-the-amazon.com ]. By linking the BitTorrent search engine [piratebay.org] to [Amazon.com] in such a way to reveal the ‘links’ between paid and free content, a critical operation is opened between the two sites that, in its turn, opens a debate over the evolution of property in the 21st century. Such critical scholarly work in the shape of software, Firefox add-ons and other methods demonstrates its force precisely when it is able to carry out what it conceptualizes. Thus we must ask what is achieved when such work is not only attacked by the corporate entity in this discussion, Amazon.com, but when the service provider is pressured to in turn subject pressure on the scholarly researchers to censure, remove and shut down the project. This is nothing less than the censorship of a critical scholarly text — a kind of book-burning of the 21C. That it takes on a very different form today illustrates how censorship itself is no longer about *what* you write, or *where* you get it from, but how the nature of the citation itself — from written text to resampling code & providing links to controversial methods of property redistribution — has shifted with the digital era. While such censure demonstrates the value of critical online work such as [ pirates-of-the-amazon.com ], it is also all too frighteningly effective in silencing the possibility of debate over precisely these questions of property, citation, hyperlinking, and sampling”.

Animating the Interface

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Here are some quotes from German sociologist and media researcher Volker Grassmuck:

“Animation’ is the bestowment of a soul onto technical objects, a secondary animism. For a specialist in psychological aspects of religion the underlying mechanism might be the same – a projection. But now the objects onto which supernatural qualities are projected are not natural any more, they are technical, man-made. They are media.”
(‘From Animism to Animation. Towards a Re-Enchantment of the World‘)

“Having passed through history from animism to animation (animateness of the first, and secondary animation of the second nature), the subject, in its quest for reunification, has returned into its self-made paradise. Flusser’s demand for thought, feeling and action in the ‘possibility’ category would thus mean getting involved with the computer. The machine, being called host and server, is only too ready to let us get involved. It is up to us to let ourselves be invited and served up by these machines, to get settled in them.”
(‘Computer Aided Nature in the Turing Galaxy. Life on stage of Computerspace‘)

Some nice video works that seem to literally take up that last advise…Stewart Smith, ‘Jed’s other poem (beautiful ground)’ (2005)

Stewart Smith programmed this entirely in Applesoft BASIC on a vintage 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM — a computer so old it has no hard drive, mouse up/down arrow keys, and only types in capitals. Code is Open Source and available on website. Cinematography by Jeff Bernier.” A nice detail of the story is that this was originally a fan vid (for the now disbanded Grandaddy – the song in the video is from their wonderful album ‘The Sophtware Slump’ (2000), that is sort of woven around the story of Jed, a forlorn humanoid robot made of junk parts who eventually dies, leaving behind a few mournful poems) but was eventually adopted as the “official” video for the song.


Michael Wesch, ‘web 2.0 … the machine is us/ing us (final version)’ (2007)
Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction. He made this video with CamStudio for the screen captures and Sony Vegas for the panning/cropping/zooming animations. He considered releasing it as an “eternal beta” in true Web 2.0 style, but decided to let it stand as it is and start working on future projects (future videos apparently will address the last 30 seconds of this video – the “rethink …” part). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. HiRes versions are available for download.


Alan Becker, ‘Animator vs. Animation’ (2006)
“An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find – the brush tool, the eraser tool – to get back at his tormentor. It’s resourcefulness versus power. Who will win? You can find out yourself.” It took Alan Becker several months to animate this piece. The sequal too him even longer!

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Roland Seidel & Achim Stiermann, ‘MAN OS / extraordinateur’ (Installation, 450x450x300 cm , 2005). Video not available as yet.

See Robert Seidel’s website for an overview of this installation. “In Man OS 1 / extraordinateur the internal work processes of a computer are presented in real human form. The Processor is a person who carries out the commands of a user on a monitor. On a stage, whose backdrop is the surface of a screen, the person executes programs, manages the operating system and interacts with a mouse pointer. Added digitally during postproduction, the pointer symbolizes the user who remains invisible throughout the film. Digital processes and human behavior are propelled together and find a common denominator in their fallibility.After the computer has been started, an e-mail arrives from Hans Holbein the Younger. He invites the computer user to smarten up the figures in the painting entitled The Ambassadors, which has arrived with the e-mail, for their Internet appearance. For instance, using Photoshop, one of the two figure’s beards is shaven off. Along with the e-mail, a virus has infiltrated the system in the form of a “bug”, which in the course of events repeatedly sabotages the work processes which seemed to be running smoothly. The character Norton Disk Doctor examines the Processor and finally finds the virus. On the Internet the Processor encounters the characters H, T, M and L, who are responsible for the configuration of the page. Together they visit a ping-pong page, a film page and a few erotic pages. In an Internet shop the processor buys some new accessories, which are then added to into Holbein’s painting. In between, the user listens to music using Soundjam. During a game of PacMan, the Processor is knocked down by ghosts. While burning the new version of Holbein’s painting on a CD, the “Toaster” catches fire and SETI (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) reveals that the figures in the painting are extraterrestrial. This is all too much for the Processor and the entire system crashes.”

Update 27.12.2008

I thought this one would fit here as well. It’s “Big Ideas (don’t get any)” by James Houston, one of the Radiohead “Nude” remix videos (see also previous post).

Morphology

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In his essay ‘Animation as Baroque: Fleischer Morphs Harlem; Tangos to Crocodiles’ (in ‘The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Soecial Effects’, and also part of the excellent reader ‘The Sharpest Point Animation at the End of Cinema’, edited by Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke) Norman M. Klein argues that one the governing concepts of animation is “the morph,” the theatrical rupture of the stable image in the transformation of a thing into something else. For Klein, it is a space of entropy within a cartoon itself-an actual “lapse” of scribbles between two more fixed images. The “morph” is a metaphoric, frequently haunted “hesitation” that embodies all our anxieties about the world around us, and it is shorthand for the entire medium’s proclivity for constant metamorphosis.

quote:
“the Morph is solid and absent at the same time. It is like a scar that narrates, a braile of absences. The viewer can practically run a finger across the ridge of hesitation, very haptic, a touch of all-at-once. the drawings leave a elegant wound as they dissolve to make way for motion.
the Morph is also a history of production itself, like many special-effects films: a history of the drawing in decay or erasure; or even of the team who made the effects. In thirties animation, the original drawing was cleaned up, then traced by inkers on to another medium: inked and painted on a cel. In the nineties, it is scanned digitally, then paint-boxed, a morph of production itself, with far fewer strings, often fewer hesitations.
Also, the morph should suggest an uneasy alliance inside the character’s body and inside the atmospheres at the same time. Like Dr. Jekyll nervously grabbing his throat, both the space and the body should look as if they might revert back, as if the air is dangerous. The morph is supposed to look unstable, in hesitation, on a journey into antimatter, where many atmospheres meet”.

Here are some wonderful examples of Morphing in the “Electronic Baroque” era

Robert Arnold: ‘The Morphology of Desire’ (1998)
‘The Morphology of Desire’ is an ongoing project which explores the commodity representation of gender and desire in popular culture, and the relationship between the still image and illusion of cinematic motion, using digital morphing to animate romance novel cover illustrations as a never-ending dance of unrealized desire. Robert Arnold: “My work explores language as object and communication by sampling text from everyday sources like movie trailers, book covers and advertising slogans, and remixing it to create ‘poems’ which address the original material in some way, often with humorous results. I work with video, digital processes and drawing.”

Ronnie Cramer, ‘Pillow Girl’ (2006)
‘Pillow Girl’ was originally a sound-art work. Artist/musician/filmmaker Ronnie Cramer scanned the covers and inside pages of a number of lurid, vintage paperbacks and magazines, then ran the collected image and text data through a variety of synthesizers. The resulting sound files were then processed and remixed into a collection of electronic soundscapes. The visual portion of the piece makes use of the covers themselves, with the illustrated figures coming to life and morphing into one another during the course of the presentation (each cover is visible in its original state for only 1/30th of a second). In addition to being a colorful and impressive visual display, the images presented in ‘Pillow Girl’ are a vivid and fascinating historical encapsulation of how women have been depicted in popular culture.

If you can Hear it, you can Have it (2)

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“If creativity is a field, copyright is the fence”

– John Oswald

What came before: Part 1

Here are some more historical and contemporary examples of explicit musical appropriation, as a sort of illustration or extension of a little article I wrote for RUIS , about music and creativity in the era of intellectual property. This is just a subjective selection, as you all know there’s much, much more out there. Sure enough practices of appropriation and “remix” are as old as creation itself, but have intensified over the past decades. As Willian Gibson notes: “our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.” Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky: “Yes, the use of technology in the process of recreation generated a culture of the remix. With the conversion of all media to digital format, the distinction between the thought (or content) and the form (insofar as that form is digital media) becomes irrelevant: both have collapsed to the bit and byte, and thus, copyrighted as data.”

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Dennis Duck, one o’clock jump, 1977
[audio:Dennis_Duck-oneoclockjump.mp3]
Dennis Duck was one of the members of the notorious Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS), a loose collective of musical oddballs active in the Los Angeles of 1970-1980, who revelled in aesthetics based around radicalism and playfulness, exploring and mutating elements of musique concrete, free jazz, noise rock and the Dada attitude of Freak Out-era Mothers and Captain beefheart. As well as producing records, LAFMS held Fluxus-style concerts and happenings and published magazines (all this is wonderfully documented on the Lowest Form of Life 10CD box set, published by the Cortical Foundation). Key players included Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, Joseph Hammer, John Duncan, Juan Gomez, Kevin Laffey, Chip Chapman, Fredrik Nilsen, Jerry Bishop, Ace Farren Ford and Rick Potts. Dennis Duck was one of the most active members, who would later go on to play with The Dream Syndicate (with Steve Wynn) and Human Hands. In 1977 he released Dennis Duck Goes Disco as a hand-made cassette, in an edition of 20, who were mainly handed out to friends. The album was made entirely with a phonograph and records, utilizing skipping and pitch changes for most of the effects. Not an entirely new procedure (see previous post), but the refreshing thing was that Duck, with his skills as a drummer, combined with an understanding of concrete sound and improvisation created a drum machine out of his record player. To quote Rick Potts: “Dennis Duck did it! He captured the Genie in the bottle. Mr. Duck spun the wheel, rolled the tape and snared the unrepeatable magic of spontaneous sound. Dennis got friendly with a sensitive phonograph and they hit the jackpot to create a musique concrete masterpiece. This sort of thing is a science of skill, balance and chance. All factors fell into place and the result is this collection of serendipitous surprises. Mere recorded skips had transcended into miraculous chance compositions. Each track is increasingly sophisticated as Duck and machine become one, building with complexity until Dennis Duck zooms right past Disco and into Techno beyond!”
available on the reissue ‘Dennis Duck Goes Disco’ (Poo-Bah, 2007)

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Ju Suk Reet Meate, untitled, 1978-1979
[audio:JuSuk_06.mp3]
Another member of LAFMS, whose stuff recently surfaced again (as well as playing live again). Ju Suk Reet Meate (pronounced as “You secrete meat”) is probably most well known as member of Smegma, but his solo outings, dating back to the end of the 1970’s, are really exciting as well. This track is one of the gems he recorded in 1978 – ’79, which were pressed in miniscule quantity in ’80. Someone described his music strikingly as “a post Zappa, stoned blues / concrete melange of guitar, tapes, found sounds and voice”. Highly recommended.
available on the reissue ‘Solo 78/79 ( aka Do Unseen Hands Keep You Dumb?)’ (De Stijl, 2007).

Richard Trythall, Omaggio a Jerry Lee Lewis, 1979
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I don’t know much about the work of Pianist-composer Richard Trythall (1939), but this piece certainly is intruiging. It was composed in 1975 as the fourth in a series of musique concrète works. Just like Tenney’s “Collages”, it was created solely through tape manipulations, applied to Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lotta’ Shakin’ Goin’ On’. The material was first cut into thematic and motivic units of various types and sizes – words, phrases, notes, chords, musical fragments, etc. These were then subjected to a wide variety of procedures (speed change, filtering, head echo, reverberation, looping, signal interruption through erasure and excerpt loops, compression, expansion, phasing, panning, multiple readings, tape passes, editing, remixing, etc.). These results were then reassembled, mixed and re-mixed, until a new composition emerged. “The abstract idea was that, like the table or newspaper in a cubistic painting, the familiar musical object – here the Jerry Lee Lewis performance – served the listener as an orientation point within a maze of new material. The concrete result, so to speak, was that the studio manipulations amplified the source material, carried it into new, unexpected areas while maintaining its past associations. As in a dream, the material could present itself intact, then dissolve and reassemble in new, vaguely familiar shapes. Moving back and forth along this line, controlling this movement, was what fascinated me.”
available on Richard Trythall’s website

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David Byrne & Brian Eno, Mea Culpa, 1980
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Dunno if this piece needs an introduction. It’s part of the classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the album that Byrne and Eno recorded between sessions and concerts for the equally magnificent Talking Heads records Fear of Music (1979) and Remain in Light (1980). The project mailny grew out of Byrne’s and Eno’s fascination for the funk mutations of James Brown, Miles Davis (anno On the Corner), James chance and Fela Kuti, the experiments in dub and club music that were spicing up the NY avant garde music scene back then (Arthur Russell, for example), as well as the recordings of music from all over the world that were exchanged eagerly in that same scene. Inspired by this music they fantasized about making a series of recordings based on an imaginary culture. At that time Eno had also started to work on some recordings that incorporated found voices, partly influenced by Steve Reich’s experiments with tapeloops, as well as compositions such as John Adams’ Christian Zeal and Activity and Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (see earlier post), both of which were released on his own Obscure label. In an interview he said “I’ve been working mostly in that direction, mostly taking radio voices because they’re easy to get hold of, and putting them to music . . . It satisfies a lot of interesting ideas for me. One is making the ordinary interesting, which I’ve always been interested in doing. The other is finding music where music wasn’t supposed to have been. And another is finding a pre-delivered message, which you put in a context so that the meaning is changed, or the context amplifies certain aspects of the meaning.” So Byrne and Eno invited some friends over and started to experiment with sounds and rhythms, using cardboard boxes as kick drums, bass guitars as rhythm instruments and basically anything that was lying around as a sound source. At that time there were no samplers, so found vocals were incorporated bu using two tape machines playing simultaneously, one containing the track and the other the vocal. Voices were “sampled” from recordings of various radio programs (the voices in ‘Mea Culpa’ were recorded from a radio call-in show in New York), as well as records of Paul Morton Dunya Yusin, a Lebanese mountain singer, The Moving Star Hall Singers and Samira Tewfik, an Egyptian popular singer. Byrne: “We continued to use ‘found’ vocals over rhythmic beds on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts … We hoped to emphasize the emotive force of the voice(s) as represented only by their sound and texture. For us, the emotion came across strongly … there was no need to understand in a logical or narrative manner what the words were about … the intense emotion carried by the quality of the voice, the melody, the rhythms, and the relationship of the vocal to the music (in two pieces we used almost the same bit of found vocal … against different music … and the effect was completely different). For us it was not only a good ‘idea,’ but an emotional experience.” The clearance of samples that Byrne and Eno sought was apparently a novelty:“no one knew what the hell we were up to.” The disk has faced at least two challenges on the grounds of the inappropriate use of the samples: the track ‘Qu’ran’, which features recordings of Muslim preachers chanting from the Koran (which Eno and company decided to leave off the recent reissue after complaints from the Islamic Council of Great Britain); and for the original version of ‘The Jezebel Spirit’, which was entitled “Into the Spirit World” and featured a recording of Christian preacher Kathryn Kuhlman, but was blocked by her estate and replaced by a recording of another preacher. The album was initially shelved, but in the meantime some of the songs were revised or left out all together. In 2006 the album was re-issued, featuring 7 previously unreleased tracks from the original album (and a video copy of one of the two films that Bruce Conner based on music from ‘My Life…’). In keeping with the spirit of the original album, Eno & Byrne offered for download all the multitracks on two of the songs, free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate.
more info on the My Life in The Bush of Ghosts website

This is a video of Conner’s film:


Douglas Kahn, Ronald Reagan Speaks for Himself, 1982
[audio:Kahn_reaganspeaks.mp3]
One of the most well known “political” audio mash-ups, based on an interview Bill Moyers did with Reagan (a ton more Reagan cut-ups can be found at the Ronald Reagan Translations page). Douglas Kahn (who has now made a name for himself as an academic, mainly thanks to his book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts) produced it using a razor blade and reel to reel player. The first version of his collage (completed before Reagan was elected) opened with the Reagan being made to say “I want to say I’m President. I want to live in the White House!” After he was elected, the intro was changed to, “For the first time in Man’s history, I uhhh, I’m President!” The first version was issued by Sub-Pop as part of a cassette compilation (#5) and got some attention on college radio. The second version was published on flexidisc in Raw No. 4,, as Kahn states “after a small skirmish with Evatone, who wanted the alternative comic magazine to obtain Reagan’s permission. As this would have, of course, been impossible, the record was eventually produced overseas.” It was also issued on a folk LP called Reaganomic Blues and included in a remix of a Fine Young Cannibals track. This form of détournement has become very popular nowadays. See, for example Chris MorrisBushwacked series (see video), and work by Aaron Valdez and Lenka Clayton.
available on Douglas Kahn’s website

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Double Dee & Steinski, Lesson 3: The History of Hip-Hop Mix, 1985
[audio:Steinski_lesson3.mp3]
No need to go into the history of hiphop here – you can read about that elsewhere or just listen to this amazing piece of cut ‘n ‘ paste by Steve Stein aka Steinski. He produced his first record – ‘The Payoff Mix’ – with engineer and studio wizard Douglas DJ Franco aka Double Dee in 1983, in response to a nationwide remix contest by Tommy Boy Records. A panel of ten judges—including Afrika Bambaataa, Shep Pettibone, Jellybean Benitez, and Arthur Baker—unanimously chose the mix as the winner. Within two weeks “The Payoff Mix” became a Top 10 request on urban radio nationwide, but the release never saw official status (because they never cleared rights) and was subsequently bootlegged countless times. The Payoff Mix became the first record in a series now known as The Lessons. Double Dee and Steinski followed up with cut-and-paste landmark ‘Lesson Two: The James Brown Mix’ en this ‘Lesson 3: The History of Hip Hop’. With these pieces, based on dozens of samples, they were one of the first succesful users of digital sampling tools: “When digital technology happened, Douglas and I, and obviously a number of other people, stumbled into it. All of a sudden, you could be referential by taking the thing itself. Instead of re-contextualizing it on your instrument in music as part of your own composition, you could then re-contextualize the piece by taking the actual piece and putting it in a new setting”. Stein says that when ‘Lesson 1’ first came out, they had difficulties clearing rights for the songs they used from the larger record labels. At that time, some didn’t even know how to charge for samples. It wasn’t until releases by succesful outfits such as De La Soul that a system was created (see article for more info on this). “It turned into, ‘Now you can’t clear it, because it’s wildly and prohibitively expensive, so only rich people can play. There is now a mechanism: If you can afford it, then definitely you’re online. But it’s strictly for basically one major label talking to another major label.” Since The Lessons, Steinski has produced a variety of tracks, that are all collected on last year’s retrospective : from his hip-hop narrative about the Kennedy assassination (originally a white-label promo, also issued as a Flexi-disk for UK music magazine NME) to ‘Nothing To Fear: A Rough Mix,” an hour-long mashup that was produced for Solid Steel/BBC London.
available on ‘What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective’ (Illegal Art)

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Tom Recchion, The Perpetual Motion Clock, 1985
[audio:Recchion_The-Perpetual-Motion-Clock.mp3]
Ah, another LAFMS member, perhaps the king bee. Tom Recchion not only designed most of the artwork for LAFMS events and releases (he is now one considered of the top graphic designers in the music industry: he made album covers for Prince, R.E.M., Alanis Morissette – a man’s gotta live – and many others), he was also active in countless musical projects, such as the Doo-Dooettes and Paul Is Dead (both with Dennis Duck) and Extended Organ (alongside Paul McCarthy, Fred Nilsen, Joe Potts and Mike Kelley), playing just about every instrument he could get his hands on: guitar, pianos, found and invented instruments, tapes, keyboards, paper, fans, synths, radio, records and finally computer. By now he has gathered quite a reputation, after collaborating with the likes of Keiji Haino, David Toop and Oren Ambarchi, but it’s worth noting that his first solo album (the wonderful Chaotica) was only released widely in 1996, although all the pieces on it were composed at the end of the 1970’s and the beginning of the 1980’s. Most of his early work consists of sound collages of looped, manipulated, and extrapolated music by so-called “exotica” or “lounge” masters such as Esquivel, Martin Denny and Les Baxter. Recchion – “the loop king”, as Terry Riley called him once – improvised with prerecorded tape loops, records, cassettes, keyboards and a battery of effects to turn their orchestral pop into something positively otherworldly. To perform these pieces in live environments he used spools of tape which were looped about the audience on mounted reel-to-reel players interspersed with plug-in glowing fireplace logs. This track was first released as a limited edition cassette, and finally resurfaced on the Chaotica album. The box LAFMS: The Lowest Form Of Music contains even more of his delicious early solo stuff.
available on ‘Chaotica’, Birdman (1996)

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The KLF, The Queen and I, 1987
[audio:KLF_queen.mp3]
Remember these guys? You might recall their anthem “What Time Is Love?”, which was a huge hit at the beginning of the nineties. You may also remember their notorious performance at the 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. Also noteworthy are their alternative art awards for the worst artist of the year and their stunt of burning one million pounds sterling. The KLF (also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (aka The JAMs), The Timelords and other names) never shied away from controversy. On the contrary. Their debut single (1987) was ‘All You Need Is Love’, based on samples from The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ and Samantha Fox’s ‘Touch Me (I Want Your Body)’. Although it was declined by distributors fearful of prosecution, and threatened with lawsuits, copies of the one-sided white label 12″ were sent to the music press, receiving positive reviews. They later re-edited and re-released the track, removing or doctoring the most antagonistic samples. The album 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), was released in June 1987. On the cover of the LP it stated: “All sounds on this recording have been captured by the KLF. In the name of Mu, we hereby liberate these sounds from all copyright restrictions, without prejudice.”Included was this song, which samples large portions of the ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’. The recording came to the attention of ABBA’s management and, after a legal showdown with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, the 1987 album was forcibly withdrawn from sale. They then underwent a pilgrimage to ABBA headquarters in Sweden and attempted to meet the group to persuade them to allow them to release the LP. The meeting failed and instead the KLF presented a Swedish prostitute with a gold disc. They then burnt most of the copies of the LP (see cover of band’s 2nd LP)in a farmer’s field (for which they were nearly shot at by said extremely angry farmer) and threw the remainder of the copies overboard on the return ferry journey home. Later they released a censored version of the LP with the samples removed, with instructions on how to recreate the original. Also check out their next single, ‘Whitney Joins The JAMs’, with samples of the ‘Mission: Impossible’ theme alongside Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ (Ironically, The KLF were later offered the job of producing or remixing a new Whitney Houston album).

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Christian Marclay, Jimi Hendrix, 1988
[audio:Marclay_Jimi-Hendrix.mp3]
Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records since the seventies. His interest in records, both as objects and bearers of sound, is expressed through sculpture, performance, video and music. Marclay grounded upon Cage and Schaeffer, but focused even stronger on the concept of noise. As sculptor, the wearing (both natural and arranged) of vinyl still remains a basis for presenting and representing music. For example, he would cut up records, glue them back together, and let people walk on the records before he uses them. Footsteps is a ‘record’ of his, but not in the normal sense: 3500 vinyl records were used as flooring at an artexhibition for six weeks, packed in covers and then sold. In performance, he mixes a wide variety of records on up to 8 turntables, fragmenting, repeating, altering speeds, playing the records backwards, etc. Marclay is a pivotal figure in the so-called “turntablism” movement, alongside Otomo Yoshihide, Martin Tétreault and scratch masters such as Mix Master Mike, Q-Bert and many others. HE also played with likeminded souls such as John Zorn, David Moss, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins etc. The album More Encores was originally released as a 10″ vinyl record on No Man’s Land (Germany) in 1988, composed entirely of records after whom each track is titled. ‘John Cage’, for example, is a recording of a collage made by cutting slices from several records and gluing them back together into a single disc. In all other places the records were mixed and manipulated on multiple turntables and recorded analog with the use of overdubbing. A hand-crank gramophone was used in ‘Louis Armstrong’. Other tracks are based on the music of Johann Strauss, John Zorn, Martin Denny, Frederic Chopin, Fred Frith, Arthur Ferrante & Louis Teicher, Maria Callas, Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg & Christian Marclay, and, in this case, Jimi Hendrix. You may also want to check out the compilation ‘Records’, with rare recordings from 1981-1989.
available on ‘More Encores’ (CD-version was released by Chris Cutler’s ReR Megacorp).

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Public Enemy, Night Of The Living Baseheads, 1988
[audio: Public-Enemy_Night_Of_The_Living Baseheads.mp3]
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was the first hiphop record that really shook my world, back when I was in high school. Even listening to it now, knowing what I know now (do I know more or less?), it’s still an intense, powerful piece of music, a showcase for the potential power of sampling. Fusing elements of free jazz, hard funk, even musique concrète, the producing team, Eric Sadler & Hank Shocklee known collectively as The Bomb Squad, created a dense, ferocious sound unlike anything that came before. They would use tape loops backed with live taps on a drum machine in place of the samplers that were typical of the time (the TR-808 f.e.). In this track for examples you can hear sampled beats and pieces from tracks by the Average White Band, the Bar-Kays, Dennis Coffey, ESG, the J. B.’s, Kool and the Gang, Sly & the Family Stone, the Temptation, Rufus Thomas, David Bowie, Kurtis Blow, and others (for an overview, see here). It was also around this time that sampling practices were more and more prosecuted. Biz Markie was convicted for sampling Gilbert O’Sullivan song. De La Soul was prosecuted for using a sample from the Turtles and had to pay 1,7 million dollars (=141,666.67 dollar per second. The judge said: “sampling is just a longer term for theft… anybody who can honestly say sampling is a sort of creativity has never done anything creative”). In the track ‘Caught, Can We Get a Witness’ Chuck D raps: “Caught, now in court ’cause I stole a beat / This is a sampling sport / Mail from the courts and jail / Claims I stole the beats that I rail (…) I found this mineral that I call a beat / I paid zero (…) They say that I stole this / I rebel with a raised fist, can we get a witness?”. In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. But by the end of the eighties, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot. In an interview Hank Shocklee said: “That’s when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. Now you’re looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style by 1991.”
available on ‘Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’

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John Oswald, Dab, 1989
[audio:Oswald_Dab.mp3]
John Oswald has been on the forefront of the sampling movement for decades now. His 1975 track ‘Power’ married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern US evangelist (inspired by William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique) years before hip hop discovered the potency of the same (and related) ingredients. In 1980, Oswald founded the Mystery Tapes Laboratory, which created unnamed, unattributed works on cassette, described as “little boxes of sonifericity specifically formulated for the curious listener. Available in your choice of aural flavors: subliminal, blasted, excerpted, repeatpeateatattttttedly, these cinemaphonically-concocted aggregates of trés different but exquisitely manifest, unprecedentedly varied festerings of audio quality fine magnetic cassette tapes are the best of whatever you’ve been listening for”. In 1985 he wrote the essay “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative” in which he proposed to experiment with existing music. “All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain. Listening to pop music isn’t a matter of choice. Asked for or not, we’re bombarded by it. In its most insidious state, filtered to an incessant bass-line, it seeps through apartment walls and out of the heads of walk people. Although people in general are making more noise than ever before, fewer people are making more of the total noise; specifically, in music, those with megawatt PA’s, triple platinum sales, and heavy rotation. Difficult to ignore, pointlessly redundant to imitate, how does one not become a passive recipient?”. In 1988 he released of the Plunderphonics EP, with “plundered” tracks, based on songs by Elvis Presley, Count Basie, Dolly Parton and Stravinsky’s. For its time it was the most extreme example of sampling ever produced. Oswald: “Dolly experiences a sex change, Elvis gets a crazy new back-up band, and the other two go through some pretty wild changes.” In 1989, Oswald released an expanded version of the Plunderphonics album containing 25 tracks, each using material from a different artist. This track, a reworking of Michael Jackson ‘Bad’, was on it. The album was praised worldwide. David Toop called it “recreational savagery”. Van Dyke Parks wrote: “The hits keep coming! Thank you for including me among those sure to admire your music. At any speed I remain yours in admiration”. A few months later however, Oswald received notice from the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of Michael Jackson that all undistributed copies of the album be destroyed under threat of legal action as of Xmas eve ’89. “They insisted I quit playing Santa Claus,” Oswald observed. He sent out a press release, stating: “I wasn’t selling the disc in the stores, so I let listeners tape it off the radio for free,” explains Oswald, who paid for the production and manufacture of the CD out of his own pocket. He receives no royalties or financial compensation for airplay. Brian Robertson, president of CRIA said, “What this demonstrates is the vulnerability of the recording industry to new technology…All we see is just another example of theft.” Also check out the Rubáiyát EP, Plexure (1993), “the most extreme example of electroquoting, backmasking, sonic morphing, pop information density, & samplephobic scare tactics yet” and the GRAYFOLDED project, commissioned by the Grateful Dead, featuring interpolations of six dozen concert versions of the Dead’s symphonic ‘Dark Star’.
available on John Oswald‘s website

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The Loop Orchestra, Romance, 1988-1990
[audio:Loop_Orchestra_Romance.mp3]
The Australian Loop Orchestra is, like Tom Recchion, another act who experimented with tape loops on reel-to-reel tape machines in the 1980’s. “The genesis of The Loop Orchestra occurred in the ashes of a simple two-tape-machine-no-man-band, The Nobodies, which died in a fire in 1980. From those ashes, and with a pastiche taken from the likes of Terse Tapes, home of seminal Australian Industrial outfit Severed Heads, an ashen poultice was formed to take up further and more involved household heretical experimentation, this time with reel-to-reel tape machines. This idea was subsequently expanded upon in the studio of Sydney radio station 2MBS-fm amid a group of experimental radio programmers. Two, John Blades and Richard Fielding, were using the studio equipment as an instrument, experimenting with tape machines through processes involving cutting, dissecting, rearranging and rejoining prerecorded tape, creating tape loops and playing them back. They felt a need to formalize their studio experimentation and so conceived the idea of creating a full blown machine orchestra. The intention of the Orchestra was for groups of instruments of an orthodox orchestra to be represented by reel-to-reel tape machines playing loops of the instruments’ sounds. In 1983 an ensemble comprising 4 reel-to-reel machines playing slowly evolving tape-loop constructions, made its live debut playing a live-to-air performance in the studio of Sydney radio station 2MBS-fm in 1983, as The Loop Orchestra.” It would take them 7 more years to finally release their first album (although they relaesed some stuff on an obscure cassette called The Men Of Ridiculous Patience). Recorded over the years 1988 – 1990 at Endless Studios, Suspense features three tracks that deconstruct and reconstruct soundtracks drawn from suspense and horror films of the 1930s through to the 1980s. A variety of eminent luminaries can lay claim to having been members of the Orchestra, including Patrick Gibson, Peter Doyle, Anthony Maher and Ashley Blower. The current lineup consists of John Blades, Richard Fielding, Emmanuel Gasparinatos, Hamish MacKenzie and Juke Wyat.
available on ‘Suspense’, Endless Recordings (1990). Subsequent records are available via quecksilber

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The Tape Beatles, I’m Waiting + Waves of Waves, 1990
[audio:tapebeatles.mp3]
The Tape-beatles are a collaboration of varying membership that make music and audio art recordings,”expanded cinema” performances, videos, printed publications, and works in other media. They began creating works for audio tape in 1987. Their goal at first was to create a form of pop music that made no use of musical instruments, instead relying on tape recording and analog studio techniques as their sole source of sounds. In addition, the Tape-beatles aspired to an egalitarian attitude of artmaking, avoiding the use of “professional” equipment and milieux, opting instead to make work almost entirely using home stereo equipment. Furthermore, The Tape-beatles espoused the use of plagiarism as a positive artistic technique. Taking their cue mainly from musique concréte and cut-up technique, The Tape-beatles made analog tape recording and basic home stereo equipment, connected in unorthodox configurations. It was the Tape-beatles’ belief that such works constituted valid works of authorship in themselves, and, like Oswald, they never asked for legal permission to use other people’s work in their compositions. These pieces are form their second album, Music with Sound, which demonstrates a development from the crude musique-concrete techniques of their earlier work, making use of more sophisticated editing and mixing techniques. By grabbing infonoise from everyday living and presenting it in a new format, sounds take on new meaning.
available on ‘Music with Sound’ (Public Works Productions) The Tape-beatles catalogue is also available on Ubuweb

More stuff later…